>age-related deafness
Interestingly, there's been some suggestion that hearing loss is not inevitable with age, but is mostly just the accumulation of noise-related hearing loss in a loud industrial society.https://canadianaudiologist.ca/a-new-perspective-on-chronic-... https://www.icben.org/2017/ICBEN%202017%20Papers/SubjectArea... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-024-00660-3 I think partly the issue is that how we measure noise doesn't match how noise causes injury. Your cochlea acts as a spiral resonant tube, essentially a "physical FFT," concentrating energy at a particular frequency onto a particular location in the spiral. Too much (local!) energy damages the hair cells, causing conductive hearing loss. But because we calculate A-weighted decibels by summing all frequencies and then checking if we're above the injury threshold (vs checking whether we exceed the injury threshold at any frequency), using A-weighted decibels can't accurately determine damaging noise levels. If all the energy is concentrated at Middle A it will cause more damage than spreading the energy out across the spectrum, even if the A-weighted decibels come out equal. It's a somewhat subtle, wrong order-of-operations problem. There's also a separate problem that A-weighting is designed to normalize for perception at various frequencies, not hearing damage. I've tried searching the literature to find out whether this is either 1)wrong, or 2)generally known within the fields of audiology and occupational hygiene, but so far I've come up empty. -- I recall an HN poster long ago saying how they wore earplugs daily to achieve "super hearing." It occurs to me that all they were doing was actually protecting their ears from damage. :-| |
FWIW, I've also heard the same, but don't remember where off the top of my head. It's at least potentially true, but the conventional wisdom among acousticians/noise control engineering is that age-related hearing loss is mostly to increasing age rather than external factors.